Faith & Spirit Quote by Leo Strauss

Strauss isn’t merely affirming monotheism; he’s making a power move about the limits of philosophy. “Not only One” nods to the familiar theological claim, but “the only possible One” escalates it into a statement about what can count as coherent divinity at all. The phrase quietly smuggles necessity into a space where modern readers expect pluralism, preference, or metaphor. It’s less “our God is best” than “the alternatives don’t even clear the bar of thinkability.”

That’s classic Strauss: staging a confrontation between biblical revelation and the philosophical impulse to reduce everything to reason. In his work on the “theological-political problem,” Strauss treats the Bible not as a cultural artifact but as a rival authority claim that modernity tried to domesticate. The subtext is that the biblical God is not one option on a marketplace of spiritualities; He is the kind of being whose existence, if granted, reorders the entire field. You don’t get to negotiate with a God who is framed as logically exclusive.

Context matters: Strauss wrote in the shadow of Europe’s collapse, where confident Enlightenment rationalism looked less like progress and more like an abandoned project. His turn to biblical seriousness is partly a diagnosis of modern relativism: once you treat ultimate claims as interchangeable, politics inherits the vacuum. “Only possible One” is a warning shot at liberal tolerance when it becomes metaphysical indifference. It also hints at Strauss’s esoteric sensibility: the strongest claims are often made with the calmest syntax, because the real argument is about who gets to define “possible” in the first place.